7 Lead-Nurturing Strategies

What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is when businesses build relationships with prospects. It is an important aspect of inbound marketing. To combine tactics like content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing and more into a holistic, effective strategy, you should start by developing a marketing plan for your business.

When a potential customer finds your business through your marketing channels, they may not be ready to purchase your products or services right away. Nurturing these leads is an effective strategy for driving sales because it can keep you top of mind for prospects, so they come back when ready to purchase. 

Lead nurturing is similar to any relationship: The more you put into it, the more you get out of it. But if you fail to strengthen a relationship, then you’ll naturally drift apart. [Looking for customer relationship management software to help manage your leads? Check out our picks for the best CRM software platforms.]

What is the importance of nurturing your leads?

Although the ultimate goal of lead nurturing is to drive sales, it offers several other benefits:

• Introduces prospects to your company. Lead nurturing is an effective way to teach prospects about your services and products. You may not have enough space on a landing page to truly explain the impact of your products and services, but lead nurturing allows you to show potential customers a more complete picture of who you are and what you can do for them.
• Helps you gain your audience’s trust. Showing your potential customers that you understand their pain points or giving them useful tips can help you connect with your audience and gain their trust. Sharing your knowledge lets them know that your relationship isn’t just about your company making a sale but also about providing them with necessary tools and information.
• Makes you a thought leader. As you create thoughtful, relevant content and communications, lead nurturing can boost your reputation and help you be seen as a leader in your industry.
• Helps your audience remember you. If you communicate regularly with your prospects, they will likely remember you. Staying top of mind is especially helpful, as they’ll turn to you when they need or want your products or services.
• Bolsters your sales strategy. Sales teams are typically focused on selling at every given moment, which means many potential customers aren’t being targeted. Lead nurturing gives you the opportunity to target future customers.
• Reduces customer acquisition costs. Lead generation allows you to turn to less expensive methods of attracting customers, and spending less on marketing is good for your customer acquisition costs (CAC = total marketing cost divided by number of sales).
• Increases sales. With lead nurturing, you can turn prospects into higher-quality leads. In fact, nurtured leads make purchases that are 47 percent bigger than non-nurtured leads, according to an Annuitas report based on research from Marketing Sherpa.

7 effective lead-nurturing strategies

There are plenty of strategies you can use to nurture leads, but keep in mind that they can change over time. A method you successfully used to engage with your prospects in the past may not work in the future. Choosing the right CRM software will allow you to automate a lot of the nurturing strategies you need to close new business.

Here are seven effective strategies for nurturing leads:

Use email marketing.

Fifty-five percent of marketers say email marketing drives the highest return on investment of all digital marketing strategies, according to research from Campaign Monitor. You can easily nurture leads through this channel by using the tools offered by the best email marketing software, which include built-in features for managing and nurturing leads. 

Not only is email marketing more cost-effective than advertising, but it can also be personalized through data and user behavior research. Email customer segmentation, or the division of subscribers into smaller groups based on different parameters, allows you to target leads more effectively.

For example, if your company created an e-book, you could send it only to subscribers who have engaged with past e-books or similar content, as they are more likely to welcome it. If you were to send it to your entire email list, some recipients would not open it and might even be annoyed by receiving an extra email, which could damage your relationship.

Email segmentation is versatile. You can target customers according to the products they browse, the type of content they download, where they are in the sales funnel, what emails they open and more. As you get more information about your prospects, you’ll be able to create increasingly personalized messages.

In addition to segmenting emails to increase open rates and engagement, consider doing the following:

• Keep the subject line short, and make sure it stands out.
• Spend time writing compelling preview text.
• Add calls to action (CTAs).
• Be concise.
• Make your emails mobile-friendly.
• Send relevant emails.
• Encourage prospects to reply.
• A/B test as much as possible.

Another benefit of email nurturing is that you can automate it. With the right tools, you can easily create email lists as well as schedule emails when it’s most convenient for you.

Keep in mind, you must strike the right balance with this strategy. You want to communicate with your audience regularly so that you’re building a relationship but not so often that they feel you are spamming them. 

To get started with email nurturing, you’ll need the right tools. Here are some to consider:

• For analytics and data:
  • Google Analytics
  • Marketo
  • Seventh Sense
• For email campaign creation and automation:
  • Constant Contact
  • Benchmark
  • Sendinblue
  • HubSpot
  • Mailchimp
  • Keap

Build out your content marketing.

Developing a content marketing strategy involves creating content, such as blog posts, e-books, FAQs, how-to articles, webinars, research reports and more. You can use this content to build brand awareness and draw in more people.

Content marketing also feeds into your other lead-nurturing strategies. For example, you can use social media and email to distribute the content you produce. Or you can add CTAs, such as encouraging readers to sign up for your newsletter or reach out for more information.

Content marketing can also help to improve your company’s reputation. Through content, you can show that you are concerned and understand your prospects’ needs. Instead of concentrating solely on your own products and services, you can shift the focus onto your potential customers.

Using the sales funnel, you can account for different leads’ needs. There are three stages in the sales funnel:

• Awareness (top of the funnel). This stage begins after a person comes into contact with your company and connects in some way. At this point, they may just be learning about your business and its products and services. You should make an effort to understand potential customers’ needs. This stage lends itself to blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, e-books, videos and infographics.
• Consideration (middle of the funnel). At this stage, things start to get more serious. Potential customers may begin to understand how your products or services could work for them, and they start to consider purchasing them. This is a good time to build trust with your leads. You can engage them with events, webinars, emails, white papers and case studies.
• Purchase (bottom of the funnel). This is when you persuade your leads to purchase from you, and it’s an opportunity to create loyal customers. Content in this stage includes coupons, product features, use cases, product comparison pages, testimonials and pricing pages.

While it’s important to think about targeting your audience when you’re creating content, you’ll also want to make sure you are creating good content. Take these steps to enhance your content strategy efforts:

• Come up with a content plan.
• Focus on quality.
• Use keywords to find relevant topics.
• Avoid keyword stuffing.
• Write for humans not algorithms.
• Check for grammatical errors.
• Create relevant content.
• Ensure your content has value.
• Write search engine optimized content.
• Include CTAs.
• Share your content on your other channels.

Get active on social media.

Social media is an effective way to build relationships with prospects. It gives them an easy way to talk to you, and it also puts your content where many people spend their time. In fact, internet users ages 16 to 64 spend an average of 2.25 hours on social media each day, according to Hootsuite.

You can use social media to distribute your content and to show some of your brand’s personality. Follow these tips to excel at social media:

• Update your content regularly.
• Post the right content to the right social media channel.
• Chat with your audience.
• Study your analytics.
• Understand your audience.
• Be mindful of trends.
• Use tools to automate and improve the process.
• Consider starting an account dedicated to customer service.

You can also use social media to retarget ads. After potential customers leave your site, they may forget about your products and services, but social retargeting can remind them about your business.

Align sales, marketing and customer support teams.

Nurturing leads is a team effort. Sales and customer support teams learn about a company’s audience firsthand, and marketing teams can have a lot of actionable data.

Effective collaboration among these teams will result in better insight, which will lead to better solutions.

Conduct surveys.

To build a connection with your leads, you must understand their needs. Business surveys allow leads to tell you what they feel in their own words. If you ask them about their goals or the problems they face, you’ll be able to make a plan for how to get them to the end of the buyer’s journey.

Score leads.

Lead scoring lets you assign a value, often numerical, to your leads based on their behaviors.

Because not every lead will be in the same stage of the sales funnel, you shouldn’t invest the same amount of energy into each prospect. For example, your lead-scoring model may assign more points to prospects who spend time browsing your site and have higher click-through rates, while fewer points go to those who’ve signed up for a newsletter but rarely open emails. Your efforts will likely make a bigger difference if you focus on the prospects who are engaging with you.

You can try to connect with those who score highly on a more personal level, such as by having a sales rep reach out to them.

Follow up with your leads after you make the sale.

Lead nurturing doesn’t end after the sale. After a customer has bought your product or service, you want them to keep coming back. According to a report from e-commerce marketing platform Yotpo, repeat customers are likely to spend three times as much as one-time customers.

Lead nurturing drives more conversions

When you spend time nurturing the leads you develop, you keep these potential customers engaged with your brand. Maybe they don’t need your products or services today, but by remaining in touch with them on various marketing channels, they’ll have your brand top of mind when they do need what you offer. Without lead nurturing, much of your marketing efforts will result in unrealized opportunities and make your sales team’s job all the more difficult. So, establish a comprehensive lead-nurturing strategy to make sure potential customers aren’t dropping out of your funnel before you make a sale.

Tejas Vemparala contributed to this article.